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The Public Image of Sen., Reed Smoot, 1902-32
Utah Historical Quarterly
Vol. 45, 1977, No. 4
The Public Image of Sen. Reed Smoot, 1902-32
BY JAN SHIPPS
IN 1926 FORUM MAGAZINE surveyed the contemporary religious scene in the United States in a series of articles by eminent members of major American faiths. Each installment contained a description of the basic creed and a discussion of what it meant to be a member. For example, G. K. Chesterton explained why he was a Roman Catholic, Harry Sloane Coffin why he was a Presbyterian, Rufus Jones why he was a Quaker. In one of the later installments Reed Smoot, a long-standing apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and senior United States senator from Utah, explained—in a clear, straightforward, concise, believable statement—why he was a Mormon.
Because this was the first time that any fairly comprehensive examination of American religion in a mass circulation magazine placed Mormonism at par and treated it with the same respect as other religions, Smoot's article marked a turning point in the way Mormonism was dealt with in the public press. This pivotal essay signaled a changed climate that made the inclusion of a Mormon confession of faith in a national magazine possible. Smoot had served in the United States Senate during the quarter-century in which that change occurred, and he had come to represent—to non-Mormons at least—more dramatically and completely than any individual since Brigham Young, the epitome of the Mormon faith.
Latter-day Saints, long accustomed to negative, and by their standards unfair, treatment of their religion must have been gratified to see something written from their own point of view. The church authorities were unquestionably pleased. They had been pursuing an active public relations policy designed to defend the church and the Mormon people from anti-Mormon propaganda for over a decade. Church leaders soon ordered the senator's article reprinted as an official LDS tract, thus emphasizing Smoot's connection with Mormonism, associating the church with his respectability, and thereby allowing Mormons to capitalize on the senator's praiseworthy reputation.
Earlier in the century, any similar attempt to utilize the Utah senator as Mormon exemplar would have been vitiated by the widespread belief that Smoot was a polygamist, a traitor, or both. The traditional view holds that the senator overcame his negative image by dint of hard work, an earnest and reverent approach to life, and the strict avoidance of even the appearance of evil. During his three decades in the Senate, Reed Smoot reversed the popular judgment to become a man who "added more luster to the name of Utah than any man . . . since the days of its founder." To put it another way, Smoot's public image was altered in significant ways between 1902 when his Senate career began and 1932 when that part of his life came to an end.
The accepted picture of a virtuous and patriotic public servant of vast influence and power that had displaced the original conception of Smoot as lawbreaker and libertine, proved a potent political asset in Utah. Although partisan attempts to question its validity were made from time to time, the image was never effectively challenged. A strong case can be made that the image of immense influence—a picture the senator had been anxious to project—in conjunction with his rigid conservatism, accounts, finally, for Smoot's defeat in 1932 when circumstances made flexibility and a liberal stance more desirable. But that is another study. The popular conception of Reed Smoot's public image has never been subjected to systematic historical analysis, and that is what is being attempted here.
Since World War II survey research techniques have been developed that make it possible to construct elaborate and exceedingly reliable public images of contemporary persons. Research methods sophisticated enough to allow comparable public-image profiles of historical figures have not yet been developed. Historians have found it so difficult to determine what the public said, thought, and felt about particular individuals that public-image studies of historical figures have largely been impressionistic comparisons of images and the realities they reflect.
Recognizing the thorny theoretical and methodological problems involved, this study attempts to deal with the image itself. Rather than trying to correlate the senator's public image with the real Reed Smoot, the present study will describe his image as precisely as possible, determine the extent to which it changed over time, suggest how and why changes either occurred or failed to occur, and examine the manner in which the image was projected, controlled, and utilized.
METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH
Studies that set forth an image and use it as a baseline to measure the disparity between what people thought about a person and what the person actually was like can tolerate a certain imprecision in the description of the image; studies that deal with the image itself demand exact formulation. To illustrate: Thomas G. Alexander's study of Smoot's land policy shows that the picture of Smoot as an unfailing conservative does not always stand up under examination; but as far as the comparison between image and reality is concerned, it does not matter exactly howconservative people thought the senator was. If, however, a comparison were to be made between how conservative the senator was perceived to be in 1906 and then in 1926, or how conservative he seemed to the people of Utah as opposed to the people of the United States, a more precise description would be required.
Exact formulation of the public image of a historical figure depends on understanding what a public image is and on developing a suitable procedure for reconstructing that image from the historical record so that it can be stated with enough precision to admit comparison. As for the term public image, when the midtwentieth century explosion of information sources and the associated growth of the public relations industry emphasized the need for understanding what public images are and how they come to be, explanations were often based on concepts taken from theories of cognition and communication and the sociology of knowledge. Popularized as "the medium is the message," such explanations were often misunderstood and dismissed. But the public images remained, and they are ultimately to be comprehended only with reference to a theoretical framework that attempts to take nonverbal messages into account. The concept that has proved most useful here was adapted freely from Kenneth E. Boulding's fine discussion of the image of man in society:
Using this definition as a framework, an attempt is made to analyze perceptions of Reed Smoot's conduct and activities and the underlying perceptions of him—as a Latter-day Saint, United States senator, Republican party member, businessman, family man, LDS church authority, and Old Guard conservative—that were shared by the people during the three decades he served in Washington.
Today's public images are projected through such a variety of media that future historians will almost inevitably have to depend on the distillations available in public opinion polls. Before radio and television, however, images were formed principally through personal contact and the printed word. Since Smoot's political career was oriented to committee work and behind-the-scenes activity, rather than through personal appearances, his national public image was mainly disseminated by the press. Therefore, a reasonably reliable public image of the senator can be recovered through a formal analysis of material written about him.
At first glance, newspapers seem the obvious resource on which to base the reconstruction of a public image, and Americans probably gained more ideas and perceptions of Reed Smoot from newspapers than from any other source. Nevertheless, using newspapers presents insurmountable difficulties. Unlike France with Le Monde or Russia with Pravda, newspapers in the United States serve regions rather than the entire nation. Despite the increasing importance of national news services during Smoot's career, it is likely that a public image drawn from major American newspapers would be skewed toward the picture held by people with access to urban dailies. Morever, given the practical necessity of working from adequately indexed newspapers, the image would be skewed even more toward the one projected in New York City.
Fortunately, the periodical press can be used. Less ephemeral but, during the years when Smoot sat in the Senate, almost as inexpensive, journals and magazines were important vehicles of information and opinion. Many magazines and journals circulated nationally. They summarized, synthesized, and interpreted the news and issues of the day. Ideas were disseminated that affected—and reflected—the public images of national figures. The images of contemporary national figures that presently emerge from the pages of Time, Newsweek, and the Reader's Digest are substantially altered by perceptions gained from the television screen. But in the first third of the century, the images projected in Mc- Clures, Cosmopolitan, Colliers, Saturday Evening Post, Harper's, Christian Century, and other American magazines can be assumed to be fairly precise. Since all important American periodicals have been exhaustively, though somewhat erratically, indexed in the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, it proved possible to work out a research design that permitted, if not a complete recovery of Reed Smoot's public image, at least a more exact reconstruction than was previously available.
The research procedure differed from traditional historical methods in several ways and involved three major steps. First, working from the senator's diaries, general histories of Utah and United States politics, and an overall picture of American attitudes toward the Mormons, the major themes of Smoot's public image were identified and cast in the form of variables with clearly defined categories. Next, a classification scheme developed with these variables was used to assess the contents of all the articles published between 1902 and 1932 that are indexed in the Readers' Guide under Reed Smoot. Going beyond the direct press treatment of the senator, all the articles indexed under Mormons and Mormonism, Utah, and U.S. Congress, Senate, were also examined; and the contents of those that made significant mention of Smoot were coded according to the same classification scheme. And finally, to bring the image into focus, the resulting data were weighted according to the circulation of the magazines in which the articles appeared.
Each article was classified by type (essay, feature, contemporary new r s, editorial, etc.), publication date, subject matter, and emphasis on Smoot. Each piece was then ranked on a series of variables designed to describe the attitude expressed toward the senator's connection with the Mormon church and the assessment of his political ability and influence. A few specific questions such as whether the article included a discussion of polygamy, the power of the LDS church hierarchy, the connection between the church and "the trusts," Smoot's business activities, his role as a husband and family man, and his personality were answered; and a judgment was made about whether the interpretive picture of the senator was positive, very positive, neutral (or too fragmentary to be interpretive ), negative, or very negative. The data yielded by this classification procedure were used to construct a statistical profile of the senator's image to serve as a basis for across-time comparison.
EXTENT AND CHARACTER OF SMOOT'S PUBLIC IMAGE
The first question is not what perceptions the American people shared about Reed Smoot but whether they shared any. Outside Utah the senator's public image seems to be restricted to a perception of him as one of a set of twins named Hawley-Smoot (or Smoot-Hawley, depending on how close one is to the Intermountain West). Was the situation different in the first third of this century? How is one to know?
Two visibility measures were devised that provide a general idea of how conscious of the Utah senator the Americans of his day were likely to have been. One—intended as an indication of the extent to which he stood out as an individual in the United States Senate—called for a comparison of the number of direct Readers' Guide references to articles written by or focused entirely on Smoot with the number of articles by or about Henry Cabot Lodge, Robert M. La Follette, William E. Borah, and Furnifold M. Simmons. Representing the Republican Old Guard, Republican insurgency, western Republican progressivism, and southern Democratic conservatism respectively, these long-term senators were selected as suitable for this appraisal. The comparison is shown in Figure 1.
FIGURE 1: VISIBILITY COMPARISON: SMOOT AND REPRESENTATIVE SENATORS*
This method of measurement—based on raw numbers with no control for unusual events such as La Follette's bid for the presidency which generated many articles—furnishes only a crude estimate of visibility. It is nonetheless perfectly obvious that Reed Smoot was not a senatorial superstar. Except for the articles published at the time of the 1902 investigation and those that appeared during the 1929 crash and the subsequent passage of tariff legislation, stories emphasizing the senator's personality were rare. In comparison with Lodge, La Follette, and Borah, Smoot had a very low public profile, much lower than was indicated by the senator's 1920, 1926, and 1932 reelection strategy, which was built around the image of a political figure so outstanding and influential that the citizens of the state could hardly afford to dispense with the "wonderful leadership" that had elevated Utah to high rank among the states of the Union.
However, the preeminence claimed for the senator in Republican campaign literature might not be as bombastic as the visibility comparison suggests. If Smoot's public profile is measured by a different yardstick —one based on how much significant mention of him is found in the articles indexed under U.S. Congress, Senate—more visibility is apparent. Between 1902 and 1932, a total of 272 articles—everything from a serialized version of David Graham Phillips's Treason of the Senate to accountings of debates, filibusters, and voting records were included. More than 18 percent, almost one in five, contained some discussion of Smoot, and 64 percent were focused on the Senate with as much or more emphasis on Smoot as on anyone else. Although Smoot's public profile as a personality separate and distinct from the Senate was fairly low, his image as a senator was plainly visible, at least for a good portion of his career.
As might be expected, when the percentage of articles about the Senate that mention Smoot is treated as an index of his visibility as a senator, the percentages for the early years seem to indicate that he was not fully identified with the Senate until the controversy over seating him was drawing to a close. Thereafter, Smoot's identification as a senator reveals a see-saw pattern of visibility, with peaks that roughly coincide with his reelection campaigns.
Unlike most first-term senators, Reed Smoot did not arrive in Washington without a national public image. The new senator from Utah was a Mormon, and in 1902 a Mormon image was already present in the public mind, formed by nineteenth-century stereotypes and sealed by B. H. Roberts, the polygamous church authority who, just two years earlier, had been denied a seat in the House of Representatives. Therefore, to complete this investigation of Smoot's visibility, a determination of the extent to which this Mormon image attached itself to the senator is also necessary.
When Smoot's career is considered as a single unit and all the articles indexed in the Readers Guide under Mormons and Mormonism during 1902-32 are examined, it is apparent—since more than one out of four contain at least some mention of the senator—that Smoot's indentification as a Latter-day Saint was stronger than his identification as a senator. Although the 200 articles in this group in no way constitute the complete body of periodical literature on the Mormons published during Smoot's political lifetime, it is reasonable to assume that they can be treated as a representative sample. That the senator is mentioned by name in 27 percent of these articles—and that in a great many of these his is the only name other than Joseph Smith and Brigham Young that is mentioned—is an impressive indication that during the first third of this century Reed Smoot became what might be called the quintessential Mormon.
FIGURE 2: SMOOT'S VISIBILITY AS A SENATOR*
A public image is a politician's stock-in-trade. Looking at Smoot's career from any angle—the Utah newspapers, his letters, the diaries— one must conclude that he made skillful use of a favorable version of his national public image in Utah state politics. A perceptive look at his career leads to the conclusion that Smoot recognized his role as the "medium" for the Mormon message and realized that his image was a matter of crucial concern to Latter-day Saints everywhere. Smoot was the Mormon senator just as Sen. Edward Brooke is the Black senator today. His efforts to present an image of rectitude must ultimately be viewed within the context of his fulfilling religious obligations as well as in terms of enhancing his personal and political fortunes.
The Latter-day Saint identity was not consistently emphasized. As illustrated in Figure 3, his initial identification with Mormonism—an identification underlined from a thousand pulpits—gave way in time. For a lengthy period during the 1920s, Smoot's exposure in the periodical press suggests a very low level of visibility as a Mormon.
FIGURE 3: SMOOT'S VISIBILITY AS A MORMON*
Plotted on the same time line (see Figure 4), these two measures reveal a fascinating and useful configuration of relative visibility. The LDS identification was decisively ascendant during the first two Senate terms; the legislative role was more evident in the midyears; and raised levels of visibility, both as senator and Mormon, occurred near the end of Smoot's long career.
The specific context in which Americans were likely to have become conscious of the Utah senator can be inferred from the subject matter of the articles. More than half were about the Senate or Smoot's activity as senator. About a third concerned the LDS church in some way, and the remainder fell into miscellaneous categories. The emphasis shifted in time, however. Overall, about 30 percent of all the articles used in this study were about tariff, taxes, and finance; but no articles were classified in that category during the senator's first terms, while two-thirds of the articles from his final term were so classified. Also, although articles about Senate personnel, rules, debates, day-by-day activities, and power structure comprised only 15.6 percent of the total, between 1915 and 1927 (during Smoot's third and fourth Senate terms) almost 40 percent of the articles came under those rubrics. Perhaps most important, from his election to the end of his first term, only some 40 percent of the articles were directly concerned with the LDS church or Smoot's connection to it, while during his second term—after the Senate investigation had been concluded—an astonishing 70 percent of all the articles were about the LDS church and/or Smoot's connection to it. By the end of his career, this had fallen to less than 10 percent, although a fourth of the articles in that final term at least mentioned the fact that Reed Smoot was a Mormon. A summary table of subject matter classifications is presented below.
FIGURE 4: RELATIVE VISIBILITY*
To summarize: the research strategy used in this study can best be described as conducting an opinion poll in reverse. Contemporary pollsters sample already formed opinions and make generalizations based on the probability that the sample is representative. Since measuring a sample of opinions held in past time is impossible, analyzing the sources from which the opinions had to be derived seems the best possible alternative. It must be remembered, then, that the following generalizations are not based on the theory of sampling, but on the assumptions 1) that although incomplete, the Readers' Guide is a good reflection of what was published in the periodical press; 2) that the periodical press, during 1902-1932 at least, was a good reflection of what was published in the country; and 3) that, since the probability of the information's having reached the public is taken into account, a reasonably accurate picture of Reed Smoot's public image could be obtained.
FIGURE 5: SUMMARY OF SUBJECT CLASSIFICATIONS*
SMOOT'S PUBLIC IMAGE AND ITS CHANGE ACROSS TIME
A public image is more than the sum of its parts. Yet, a description of the image must necessarily deal with the separate parts. In Reed Smoot's case, the overwhelming impression is that the major dimension of his image was power. The measurement of alleged power is very difficult, but an attempt was made to assess the extent of influence—the concomitant of power—the Utah senator was thought to have wielded. Each article was ranked on a scale from one to five (not at all influential to extremely influential) with regard to Smoot's purported influence within the Republican party and with regard to national politics and foreign policy. The results showed so little variability (1.2 and .8 respectively) and such elevated means (4.5 and 4.6 respectively) that an almost universal perception of intense power is indicated.
The perception of power was apparently established in the public mind before the new Utah senator ever left home to go to Washington, and it remained until he was defeated in 1932. Although the power attribute was undisturbed during those thirty years, its sources changed demonstrably. At first the power was not tied to the senator himself; it was inherent in his membership in the LDS apostles quorum, the men who "controlled the Mormon people in all the world." Additionally, in 1907, was the power that adhered to LInited States senators who, as every reader of muckraking literature knew, had by "aggrandizement and centralization of power" established an amazing ability to control the nation. The conception of Smoot's power increased before his first term expired when it became clear that he had been accepted into the "inner circle," that group of senators who were, in fact if not in name, "the government of the United States." 10 About 1910 these earlier perceptions of power were reinforced by the belief that an ominous connection between the Mormon church and the trusts existed and functioned as an additional source of strength for the Utah senator who was just another "boss-made" politician with bosses who "happened to be apostles whose speech was somewhat more Biblical than political."
After the 1912 Republican convention and, more particularly, after that year's presidential election when Utah cast its vote for Taft, the perception of the sources of the apostle's power shifted. It appeared that the Mormon church and, by extension, the Utah electorate were controlled by Reed Smoot. This subtle turnabout was crucial to the altered conception of the sources of the senator's power in the 1920s.
Some continued to suggest that Smoot's presence in Washington was due to the "willingness of the rank and file of the Mormon Church to vote for a wooden image if it bore the hierarchical seal of grace" or that his influence was rooted in the Republican Old Guard, but as time passed, the senator's power was credited more to his own political sagacity, hard work, and encyclopedic knowledge. He ' : oozed statistics and reveled in facts"; he knew thirty thousand different things about the tariff; "he had a more complete knowledge of the details of the business of the U. S. than any other one man"; and he became, as Mark Sullivan said, "a kind of head bookkeeper for the nation." Moreover, his commanding position had been reached by hard work, not political chicanery.
Attitudes toward Smoot's power changed during his final years in Washington. When his power was thought to be rooted in an immoral and traitorous religious organization and a venal and corrupt legislative body, the power had been seen as dangerous and evil. As he went down to defeat in 1932, the senator's power, so clearly evidenced in the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, w r as again perceived as dangerous, not because he was wicked but because he was mistaken.
The difficulty of studying the senator's power image seems insignificant beside the difficulty of measuring changes in the intensity of his political conservatism and determining ways in which perceptions of his political posture changed. The trouble lies partly in the subjective nature of definitions of conservatism, but it goes deeper than that. A real person is round and multifaceted; an image is flat, two-dimensional. To be reflected in a public image, differences must be great and clear-cut. A few of the articles studied described Smoot as "very," "extremely," or "unfailingly" conservative; but such explicit descriptions were rare enough that analysis depended on the re-creation of the early twentieth century political atmosphere in the United States, with enough depth and breadth to detect variation. Distinctions in the way Smoot's political stance was perceived undoubtedly existed. But since the senator never stepped outside the "Apostle of Protection" role he assumed during the Payne- Aldrich Tariff debate and since no significant break in his alliance with the conservative Republican regulars was ever reported, such distinctions were so blurred that trying to reconstruct them proved impossible. The conventional interpretation must stand undisturbed.
If this analysis does not alter the senator's political conservatism image, it does cast doubt on the notion that the picture of his moral character changed across time. Some newspaper accounts treated John Leilich's polygamy charge as verified rather than alleged, giving rise to concern about the senator's virtue, but that aspect of the minister's protest was immediately disputed. The image of Smoot's character projected in the periodical press was generous and favorable from the very first. None of the articles considered charged personal involvement in polygamy and almost 20 percent contained positive descriptions of the senator's moral character. Nevertheless, the polygamy concept cannot be ignored entirely. It was one of the features of Smoot's public image that changed more than any other: his identification as a Mormon. The disappearance of polygamy from the active anti-Mormon lexicon was one of the principal factors producing that change.
All of the major dimensions of the senator's public image are so interrelated that isolating the power, political stance, and moral character for separate examination—useful as that tactic has been—is somewhat artificial. The Mormon dimension was anterior to all the others. It would be, therefore, not only artificial but extremely difficult to apply the same strategy to it. The attitude tov/ard Smoot's connection with the LDS church as expressed in the articles was correlated with the gross positive-neutral-negative interpretive picture of the senator to such a significant extent (.001+) that isolating his identity as a Latter-day Saint from the remainder of his image, even for analytic purposes, is quite impossible. Instead, a series of capsule profiles summarizing the senator's image in each of his Senate terms will be drawn.
American attitudes toward the Mormons were generally negative throughout the nineteenth century, but they became less so in the 1890s after the church promised to give up polygamy and relinquish its hold on Utah politics. The election of B. H. Roberts—who had ignored the 1890 Manifesto against future plural marriages—to the House of Representatives only two years after statehood was seen as an indication that the LDS church did not intend to keep faith with the American people. Roberts was not allowed to serve his term in Washington. The election of an LDS apostle to the Senate, coming as it did on the very heels of Roberts's exclusion from the House, was seen as further proof of lack of faith. Most Americans failed to fathom the intricacies of Utah politics that produced the change of political dictation. Yet, all could understand polygamy. Consequently, the inevitable opposition to Smoot played upon the public's revulsion for the "continuance of polygamous conditions in Utah." The Salt Lake Ministerial Association's protest against Smoot's seating—which became the source for innumerable petitions—was based almost entirely on the argument that Smoot, as one of the ruling authorities of the Mormon church, was guilty of encouraging polygamy. He might be a man of "blameless character," but he "felt no scruples in sitting at the council board and fellowshipping with his seven apostolic brethren who were living in polygamy in violation of the law."
During his first term in the Senate, Smoot's identification with the LDS church was almost complete; during those same years the public's perception of Latter-day Saints, influenced greatly by the fight against the polygamist Roberts, was a most negative one. Thus the finding that, between 1902 and 1909, attitudes expressed toward Smoot's connection with the church were unfavorable at least 65 percent of the time was not unexpected. But finding that his initial public image was not predominantly negative was somewhat surprising.
The image projected in the periodical press during Smoot's first term can only be fully comprehended when it is understood that it was a double image, one directly reflecting—and abetting—the attack conducted by a variety of groups and churches, and the other, a defensive refraction of that image that changed the direction from negative to positive. About half of the articles analyzed were too matter-of-fact to allow assessment of the writer's intended interpretation of Smoot; but, in the remainder, the statistical picture is neatly balanced between the two images. An overall negative interpretation of an apostle who was unfit for service in the Senate because he was bound by secret oaths to give first allegiance to Mormon authorities who were responsible for the continuation of polygamy in Utah was projected in 26.3 percent of the articles. On the other hand, 26.4 percent described Smoot as "a man of unquestioned purity and integrity of character," "a model husband and father, an honest and upright citizen in every respect" who was a "painstaking and conscientious representative of his state."
The situation changed markedly in the senator's second term, but not in all respects. His connection with the Latter-day Saints was slightly less visible. He was identified as a Mormon in 83.6 percent of the articles down from 89.5 percent during his first term. Attitudes toward his connection with the LDS church were also slightly altered. Where there had been negative overtones 65 percent of the time, the figure rose slightly to 67.5 percent. These are negligible differences. However, the shift in the overall interpretive picture of Smoot is astonishing. Instead of the firstterm double image—approximately one-fourth positive, one-half neutral, and one-fourth negative—the second Senate term portrait is so overwhelmingly negative—over 65 percent of the articles projected an overall negative interpretation while only 16.4 percent projected a positive picture-—that there can be no doubt that Smoot's public image between 1909 and 1915 was alarmingly dark.
The violent journalistic attacks on the LDS church in the 1910s have been treated heretofore as a delayed reaction, but an integral part of the assault on the church occasioned by the Smoot investigation had its roots in the remains of Mormon-Gentile political, economic, and religious conflict in Utah. The same tired arguments, the same examples of political and economic exploitation, the same instances of the "new polygamy," were used as evidence of LDS perfidy; but the intensive analysis required by this research method demonstrates that the attack on the church in Smoot's second term was not classic antl-Mormonism. The onslaught came from a different quarter and had roots not found in the context of Mormon history or even within the larger context of Mormon-Utah economics and politics. This new attack was almost an accident of chronology.
Reed Smoot went to the Senate in 1903, the beginning of the muckraking era. Arriving too late to receive more than a single passing mention in Treason of the Senate, Smoot spent his first term unnoticed by the muckrakers. However, after the Payne-Aldrich Tariff debates, the muckrakers looked about to see what could be learned of the Utah senator.
Commenting on the Smoot case in 1907, an Outlook editor admitted that he had not read all the testimony presented before the Senate committee because "life is too short." Judging from the contents of their articles, the muckrakers did not agree; they read the volumes carefully and used the information for a new assault designed to prove that the Mormon church, like Standard Oil and the Cincinnati bosses, endangered American democracy. The inflated emphasis on Senator Smoot's power and influence indicates, however, that the muckrakers were as much disturbed by the senator's membership in the "inner circle" in Washington as they were about undemocratic decision-making in Salt Lake.
Generalizing too much is always dangerous, but this analysis suggests that there was a significant difference in the character and purpose of the attack on Smoot during the Senate investigation and the renewed onslaught on the Mormon church during his second term. The first, for all its roots in the local Mormon-Gentile situation in Utah, was essentially a religious attack whose real target was the LDS church. The second, for all its traditional anti-Mormon rhetoric, was essentially a secular attack directed, to a large degree, against Reed Smoot—again, a subtle but important turnabout. The first was mainly carried by evangelical Protestant groups, women's missionary societies, and limited-circulation magazines with a commitment to mainstream religion. The second campaign was almost totally conducted by that part of the mass-circulation press that concerned itself more about warts on the body politic. The first reached thousands, the second, millions. If the image of Reed Smoot the quintessential Mormon can be said to have influenced the way people have thought about LDS church leaders in the twentieth century, then his sad, dark, heavily materialistic, spiritually shallow image from the muckraking era must surely be an important component of the modern American image of the Latter-day Saints.
The muckraking era drew to a close as Smoot's second term was ending; and whatever the long-range effect, it seems not to have influenced greatly the senator's public image in his third term. Actually, during these middle years, Smoot's public profile was lower than at any other time. Only 6.9 percent of the articles studied were published between March 1915 and March 1921, a group to small to analyze in any meaningful statistical way. Nevertheless, one observes that the Mormon dimension of the image is decidedly different. Less than half of the articles identified the senator as a Latter-day Saint, and of those some 60 percent saw the connection as positive. The overall interpretive picture reveals 44 percent still negative, but the unfavorable side of his image seems predicated on his political conservatism rather than his Mormonism.
By the beginning of his fourth term, Smoot's public image had become generally positive. These are the years when the ideas about his superior political wisdom, hard work, and tremendous knowledge were most fully worked out. His unpopular position on the Teapot Dome matter was offset by the respect he earned on the foreign debt funding commission and on the finance committee. His identity as a Mormon was rarely mentioned as casual information but discussed only when a value judgment was implied; and again, in 60 percent of the cases, the value was positive. No articles were coded as very negative, while over 30 percent were coded as very positive—from the senator's point of view an altogether acceptable public portrait.
An even larger number of the articles during Smoot's fifth and final term, 46.5 percent, w r ere classified very positive. But it is likely that the most favorable and flattering public image of the senator was projected during his fourth rather than his final term. A counterimage of considerable importance was projected in the late 1920s by journals with influence beyond the number of copies printed, and for that reason the statistical picture developed from the data weighted to take circulation into account is probably misleading.
In an article published in the American Mercury during the 1926 reelection campaign, Nels Anderson, who knew the Mormons well, sketched out his conception of the portrait of the senator in the "Babbitt press," and then he proceeded to demolish it with rapierlike thrusts of ridicule. In the following years, several variations on Anderson's "Pontifex Babbitt' appeared in American Mercury, Literary Digest, Nation, and New Republic. The Saturday Evening Post might have felt that the Mormon church should be congratulated if it was responsible for returning a person of Smoot's calibre to the Senate, but Bernard De Voto, N. B. Musser, and their colleagues could only express sympathy for "the thousands of young Mormons who go about the earth seeking to make converts [who] find their efforts fruitful only among people capable of believing that God speaks through Reed Smoot."
In summary, the senator's public image in the periodical press during his first term was a double one, about equally balanced between positive and negative. In his second term the image was almost unrelievedly negative. During the third, the image itself almost disappeared, only to return in a very positive guise during the fourth term. The highly favorable image continued to be projected in Smoot's final years in Washington, but it was qualified considerably by a negative shadow.
In this day of sophisticated public relations management, a study of this nature is not complete without some examination of the extent to which an attempt was made to control and shape the image. The answer to such a question is not to be found in the study of the public portrait but in the study of the portrait's subject. Here the answer can be found in the pages of Reed Smoot's diary. Even a cursory reading of this monumental document indicates that, as any good politician has to be, the senator was vitally interested in his public image. He made himself accessible to reporters and journalists, he subscribed to a clipping service and saved all the clippings, he noted press accounts of his activities, and —as in the case of the incident where he put his feet on a table at which the French ambassador sat—he worried when the accounts were unfavorable. One searches in vain for evidence that the senator ever made any serious attempt to manipulate his public image, however. When necessary he protected it as best he could, and he sought to shape it by writing a steady stream of articles. But, in the final analysis, Reed Smoot controlled his public image by living in such a way that his image did not have to be manipulated.
He did work hard: "so tired I can hardly see" was a commonplace notation in the diary. He was devout; no hint of irreverence is found. He even cared, as every human-interest story maintained, about the animals in the zoo. He was thrifty, honest, virtuous, and loyal. And if his decisions—especially the decision he made to borrow money from one of the major witnesses at the outset of the Teapot Dome investigation—were not always as wise as the political sagacity dimension of his image implied, the fact remains that—aside from his questionable financial involvement with the oil magnate E. L. Doheny—any comparison between the image Reed Smoot wished to project and the reality of his personal life would be high indeed.
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